The other laughed gently. “But if I don't know what a real winter is, how can I tell whether I will like it or not? All I do know is that I am perfectly willing to go and find out. Oh yes--truly--I should like very much to go.”
Miss Madden sighed briefly. “All right,” she said, but with a notable absence of conviction in her tone.
A space of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through another note, the envelope of which had borne no postmark. She pouted her lips over the contents of this missive, and raised her eyebrows in token of surprise, but as she laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her companion.
“It's from our young friend,” she explained, genially--“the painter-boy--Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me of a promise he says I made--that when I came to London he should paint my portrait. I don't think I promised anything of the kind--but I suppose that is a detail. It's all my unfortunate hair. They must have gone by this time--they were to go very early, weren't they?”
Lady Cressage glanced at the clock. “It was 8:40, I think--fully half an hour ago,” she answered, with a painstaking effect of indifference.
“Curious conglomeration”--mused the other. “The boy and girl are so civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. I'm afraid they are spoiling him just as the missionaries spoil the noble savage. They ought to go away and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather effective--but they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, for example, never altered in the slightest degree the habits he formed when he was a poor workman. To the day of his death, blessed old man, he remained what he had always been--simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly, and thrifty--a model peasant. Nothing ever tempted him a hair's-breadth out of the path he had been bred to walk in. But such nobility of mind and temper with it all! He never dreamed of suggesting that I should walk in the same path. From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible and generous. I must have been an extremely trying daughter, but he never said so; he never looked or acted as if he thought so.--But I never stop when I begin talking of my father.”